Our Top Picks grand prize winner shows us the meaning of customization

Last year, an innovative direct marketing campaign got really personal with thousands of administrative assistants. So personal, that 20 percent of them let the mailer treat them to a cup of coffee. In fact, the latte-loving direct mail recipients sent Montage Graphics to the top of a heap of contestants vying for first place in the first annual Deliver® “Top Picks” contest.

In a recent issue, Deliver asked its readers to submit their best work to undergo the scrutiny of our discerning judges. We pored through the entries and chose the cream of the crop. The prize was to have their campaigns featured in an upcoming issue of Deliver, and … well … this is that issue.

Partnering with Boise, Idaho, direct marketing agency Oliver Russell, Montage Graphics, a one-to-one marketing services firm in Fort Collins, Colo., produced a beautifully designed, highly personalized and incredibly successful campaign for a high-profile technology company’s imaging and printing group.

The mailer, which achieved an impressive response rate, displayed an overflowing, frothy latte. But what made it stand out was that each of the 14,000 mailers was unique: The recipient’s first name was spelled out, on the latte’s foam, in chocolate sprinkles. Not only did people respond to the mailer, they loved it so much that they kept it and displayed it on their walls.

What Montage created was a state-of-the-art version of personalized marketing – a trend that’s gaining ground quickly in direct marketing circles as businesses prove that personalization not only works, it’s also getting more practical as advances in printing and database technology make it easier and cheaper to do.

The impetus for the campaign came from Montage’s client’s desire to get more information on the office-equipment-purchasing responsibilities of administrative assistants. To explore whether admins actually possess purchasing power for printers and supplies, the company wanted to get these employees to answer a brief survey. In the past, conventional DM campaigns had limited success in getting recipients to reply to a call for survey respondents, so the company knew it would have to try something unique to get the information it needed.

The solution: Make personalization work to its fullest. Using some savvy database programming and a printing technology by Montage Graphics called “PhotoText,” it’s possible to personalize creative to a very high degree – for instance, spelling out a recipient’s name in a photo of leaves on a lawn or cookies in a box. So when it came time to lead this campaign, Oliver Russell project manager Kristy Stanaway thought of Montage Graphics.

As an incentive, the client was willing to give away $10 coffee cards to each survey respondent. Using the coffee card as their inspiration, the team – Stanaway and Montage Graphics owner Toby Gadd – dreamed up the idea of PhotoTexting the recipient’s first name in a photo of a latte brimming with froth. “We went through a number of images trying to find the most scrumptious cup of coffee we could,” Stanaway says.